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I love math. I've always loved math.

I've loved math since before it was cool, when being a girl and liking math was not just uncool, it was downright dorky. Despite this awkward social positioning, I loved math because it's so powerful.

With data, analytics, and statistics you’ve got the keys to unlock many of life’s secrets. And better yet, you can solve real-world problems.

[Editor's note: This is one of a brief series of articles about women in technology, posted to coincide with International Women's Day. Read the previous articles by following the links at the end of this one.]

In My Experience...

From early in my childhood, and even in my career today, math is power: It helps me solve problems. For example:

As a young child, I often acted as my grandmother’s translator, helping with the shopping (she didn’t speak English). I took this responsibility very seriously and used my math to ensure she was getting the right change.

As a high school student, I used my skills to design mouse mazes for science fair competitions. Sounds nerdy, but I won, and it was cool. We used mind-bendingly complex algorithms to calculate how the different shapes slowed a mouse down. [Editor’s note: Don't be concerned, Cynthia’s mice lived a good life.]

As a mom, when my two daughters wanted junior bridesmaids dresses exactly like the bridesmaids, I used my geometry skills to create a pattern. No, it wasn’t Project Runway, but it wasn’t dorky, either. And I was very proud because the dresses were gorgeous—more importantly, my daughters thought I was cool.

And as a technologist, I use my skills to make fact-based decisions, such as software quality using risk-based testing. Admittedly, this example sounds a little nerdier than the others, but with today’s tools, data analysis, and an understanding of underlying principles, math can be fun.

And it makes you look really smart: As a woman, that’s always cool.

From Big-Data To STEM

In the past, when doing research, we’ve always had to operate just with a subset of data, due to technology constraints and lack of information. We’ve had only a portion of the whole, and we’ve had to proxy that portion into a rough representation of reality.

However, with today’s technology advances—Big Data—we can now process entire population data-sets. We can look for patterns and trends that may have been missed in a partial sample.

So what this means is that big data is starting to reveal things we never knew before. We can see patterns; we can uncover secrets that eluded us for so long. And that’s cool.

We also get to ask questions we didn’t even know we could ask! We thought the answers were impossible to seek because the data was so big. But now we can ask those questions and find those answers—with math. That’s really cool.

This makes it a very exciting time to be involved with math, with big data, and with analytics. It makes it an exciting time for a woman to make a career choice pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).